Pages

Friday, 31 January 2014

Sepia Saturday - A Wartime Traveller's Tale

Sepia Saturday give bloggers an opportunity to share their family history and memories through photographs.

I have few travelers amongst my ancestors. Alice Mason nee Rawcliffe, with six children under 11 years old plus two pieces of baggage, emigrated to New York in 1887 and has featured before on my blog. My aunt Peggy emigrated to Australia in 1949, but I know little of her life there. So here is a traveller's tale from my father.

A FAR EAST WARTIME JOURNEY

My father, John P. Weston. served in the RAF Codes & Ciphers Branch Here is a story from his wartime memories that he wrote down for me, though I doubt if luggage played much of a part.Left is the only photograph I have of him in tropical kit.

"VE Day I spent at Wiesbaden in Germany. The following day a signal arrived from
London saying I was to go the Cocos Islands in the Indian Ocean, where there
was a tracking station.

I
flew back home via Paris, landing at RAF Benrose, Oxford and then by rail home
for 10 days leave. I
them received instructions to report to RAF Lyneham, Wiltshire to fly out east. On the last night there, I made a telephone call
home. I said to the operator "I am
off to the Far East, will you give me some extra time" - she did - which I did not have to pay for.

Then off on a circuitous route because we were
not allowed to overfly certain counties.
My travel documents said I was priority three – there were ten degrees,
with Generals number one. We flew to
Marseilles, then to Sardinia (refuel), over Malta to El Adam, near Tobruk.,
along the North African coast past Cairo and onto Palestine for a 36 hour break
and went to Bethlehem. Our base was
Lydda right on the coast. The flies were
a major menace!"

"We
flew onto Bahrain in the Gulf and then to Habayra (RAF airfield in Iraq) –
temperature 104F when we landed there at 4a.m.
I could hardly breath. Then onto
Pakistan, Bombay, Calcutta, Madras and across to Ceylon. I went by rail to Mountbatten’s HQ some 8000
feet in a tropical town of Kandy.

My
stay there was brief, but I remembered the good food. I was told plans had changed and I was
rerouted to Bombay. It was take off in
Colombo and we had almost reached the point of no return when the plane burst
a tyre, which delayed us 24 hours. We took off at 4am on the second
occasion.

"In Burma things were moving to a close. I was there at the ceremony in Rangoon when
the Japanese capitulated. I was based at
the university. We were always short of
tea, which seemed odd in that part of the world, but there was plenty of
cocoa. I also had a ration of one bottle
of gin and one of lime juice a month. I
used to drink that under my mosquito net at night watching the mosquitoes run up and down
the wall.

In
November 1945, I was called back for demob.
A driver took me by jeep to the airfield some 20 miles away. I sat with a rifle (loaded) on my knee since
we had to travel through some forests frequented by Dacoits (a terrorist organization in Burma). The time was 5am.
and we made it all right. I flew to Calcutta again and was there for some
days. Calcutta was an awful experience. Flies crawled over people sitting
in the gutters day and night.

We were due to take a
train across the desert to Bombay, some 3000 miles. But there was rioting against the
English in Calcutta and we had to return
to camp. Later we were taken by armoured
cars to the station. On the long journey
across India, we stopped at stations to get some food. We had this on trays, and as we walked along
the platform back to the train, hawks dived down and snatched the food.

I had a short break in Bombay before sailing on the "City of Asia"
for home. I was in charge of a deck of
some 200 men. We eventually arrived at
Liverpool on Christmas Day and went to a camp at Birkenhead. Then I caught a train to Blackpool and arrived
home by taxi at 2pm.

One of the first things I
did was to cradle you in my arms – you were shy – no wonder!"

Head HERE to discover more travellers' tales from Sepia Saturday bloggers.

Thank you, all, so much for the lovely comments on my post. I feel very proud that my father left me such stories of his boyhood and his wartime experiences It is moving to read them again and I am pleased to share them with other bloggers.

A fascinating post (as always). I suspect that if you asked the monolithic telephone companies for more time because you were going out east today you would get short shift. But at least we have Skype.

Thank you, Bob and Kristin, for raising the issue of Pakistan. I must admit this had not struck me before. I have done a quick Google, but so far have not clarified whether there was an area in the old British Indian Empire called Pakistan before partition. Or my father could have just have been referring to the fact he flew over what is now Pakistan.

A great wartime travel story, but the last paragraph is the best. Pakistan was only a regional term before 1947. Did you know that after partition, George VI took on the title King of Pakistan and then Elizabeth !! became Queen of Pakistan until it became an Islamic Republic in 1956?

About Me

I have been interested in family history for years. It all began when I was allowed as a child to look through the old family photographs and memorabilia kept in a shoebox in the cupboard at my grandfather's house. That treat started me on a fascinating ancestral trail.